Harmonicity aids hearing in noise

Abstract

Hearing in noise is a core problem in audition, and a challenge for hearing-impaired listeners, yet the underlying mechanisms are poorly understood. We explored whether harmonic frequency relations, a signature property of many communication sounds, aid hearing in noise. We measured detection thresholds in noise for tones and speech synthesized to have harmonic or inharmonic spectra. Harmonic signals were consistently easier to detect than otherwise identical inharmonic signals. Harmonicity also improved discrimination of sounds in noise. In contrast to other documented effects of harmonicity, harmonic detection advantages were comparable in musicians and non-musicians. The results show that harmonicity is critical for hearing in noise, demonstrating a previously unappreciated aspect of auditory scene analysis. The consistency of the effect across synthetic and natural stimuli, as well as across musical expertise, suggests its importance in everyday hearing.

Deep neural network models reveal interplay of peripheral coding and stimulus statistics in pitch perception

“…Such a strategy evidently works well for idealized environments (where the lowest harmonics are never masked by noise), but not for realistic environments containing noise, and diverges from the strategy employed by human listeners. This result suggests that pitch is also in part a consequence of needing to hear in noise, and is consistent with evidence that human pitch perception is highly noise-robust 57 . Together, these two results suggest that explanations of pitch perception cannot be separated from the natural environment.…”

“…Like harmonic tones, inharmonic tones generated in this way have frequency components that increase in spacing as the nominal F0 is increased, but unlike harmonic tones they lack a fundamental frequency in the range of audible pitch (i.e., above ~30Hz 86 ). Empirically, human perceptual signatures of F0-based pitch are disrupted by inharmonicity 20,55,57 , making it a way to distinguish human-like representations of F0 from coarser representations of frequency spacing. The same jitter pattern (i.e., the same mapping of nominal harmonic numbers to jitter value) was applied to all stimuli regardless of F0 and harmonic composition.…”

Harmonic Cancellation—A Fundamental of Auditory Scene Analysis

“…In contrast to results just reviewed, a target within a noise background is easier to detect if it is harmonic than inharmonic ( McPherson et al. , 2020 ).…”

“…In contrast to results just reviewed, a target within a noise background is easier to detect if it is harmonic than inharmonic ( McPherson et al. , 2020 ). This inconsistency is resolved if we reflect that a harmonic target is likely detected in noise on the basis of its pitch ( Scheffers , 1984 ; Hafter & Saberi , 2001 ; Gockel et al , 2006 ), which is probably more salient if the sound is harmonic.…”

Convergent evolution in a large cross-cultural database of musical scales

“…Despite these cultural phenomena, percepual experiments on the octave tend to demonstrate rather weak effects [90][91][92][93], which are often conditioned on musical training [94][95][96]. Nonetheless, recent work has shown strong effects for harmonic sounds in general, with regard to tonal fusion [13,93], the ability to hear in noise [97], and memory of complex tones [98]. Altogether, the evidence points to a scenario where humans may be able to take advantage of the mathematical regularities, and statistical abundance of harmonic sounds, in such a way that this faculty can be strengthened through cultural traditions and experience.…”